media, culture, politics, academic life, weasels

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Word Needed

We need a pithy designation (one word would be best) for something that happens frequently in political and social life. The gist of it is as follows. People get furious about, say, the injustices of capitalism, and conditions license them to act. They can’t attack the actual capitalist, who lives on a yacht out in the bay, so they drag the owner of the corner store, who is barely more fortunate than they, out from behind the corner and beat him. What will we call this? Proximate resentment? Neighborly betrayal? Narcissism of small class differences? Power differential of the relatively powerless? I see a lot of it going on (viz., Chris Christie’s berating of school teachers and firemen for being featherbedders, which was well received by people who make about the same amount of money but can’t look forward to a pension; university politics…). Lexicographers, do me a solid, give that thing a name so we can direct more attention to analyzing it.